Solar Cycle 25 Blog

Although its peak is still four years away, a new active period of Earth-threatening solar storms will be the weakest since 1928, predicts an international panel of experts led by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and funded by NASA. Despite the prediction, Earth is still vulnerable to a severe solar storm.

Solar storms are eruptions of energy and matter that escape from the sun and may head toward Earth, where even a weak storm can damage satellites and power grids, disrupting communications, the electric power supply and GPS. A single strong blast of “solar wind” can threaten national security, transportation, financial services and other essential functions. The panel predicts the upcoming Solar Cycle 24 will peak in May 2013 with 90 sunspots per day on average. If the prediction proves true, Solar Cycle 24 will be the weakest cycle since number 16, which peaked at 78 daily sunspots in 1928, and ninth weakest since the 1750s, when numbered cycles began.

As the Rudd government geared up its push for a CO2 cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme (ETS), which would annihilate what’s left of Australia’s collapsing physical economy, a public symposium last Sunday heard evidence from several leading Australian scientists that climate change is a natural phenomenon.

The symposium, ignored by the lying mainstream media, was held at Monash University and convened by Emeritus Professor Lance Endersbee. Several scientists identified hard evidence that severe cooling is the biggest climate challenge that we face—and its cause is entirely natural.

Professor Lance Endersbee, former Pro-Vice Chancellor of Monash University, clearly pointed out that for thousands of years human civilisation has endured natural climate variation much greater than any climate change in the last century. When warm climate prevailed civilisation flourished such as in Ancient Greece, whereas cold climate led to crop failure and mass migration of people escaping the bitter cold, for example during the Dark Ages.

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.

Most of the long-term climate data collected from various sources also shows a strong correlation with the three astronomical cycles which are together known as the Milankovich cycles. The three Milankovich cycles include the tilt of the earth, which varies over a 41,000 year period; the shape of the earth’s orbit, which changes over a period of 100,000 years; and the Precession of the Equinoxes, also known as the earth’s ‘wobble’, which gradually rotates the direction of the earth’s axis over a period of 26,000 years. According to the Milankovich theory of Ice Age causation, these three astronomical cycles, each of which effects the amount of solar radiation which reaches the earth, act together to produce the cycle of cold Ice Age maximums and warm interglacials.

This article is one of a continuing series on the impacts of Solar Cycle 24 (2009-2020).

On May 19, 2009, record low temperatures were recorded in 28 states, more than half the states in the United States of America. Many of these record low temperatures are the lowest in 100 years, and some the lowest in 115 years. Iceagenow.com, a web portal tracking global temperatures reports, “If there had been record warmth in 28 states, your would have seen ‘we're-causing-global-warming’ headlines plastered across the front page of almostevery newspaper in the country, and TV hosts would have gleefully announced the dire news. . . . But had you even heard about this?”

NOAA’s full report on these locations and record low temperatures is set out at the end of this Examiner.com article.

In an April 2, 2009 article, retired U.S. Navy physicist and engineer James A. Marusek writes: “The sun has gone very quiet as it transitions to Solar Cycle 24…. We are now at a crossroad. Two paths lie before us. Both are marked with a signpost that reads “Danger”! Down one path lies monstrous solar storms. Down the other path lies several decades of crushing cold temperatures and global famine.” “A quiet sun will cause temperatures globally to take a nose-dive. We will experience temperatures that we have not seen in over 200 years, during the time of the early pioneers.

There have been various emergency economic proposals put forward recently, in that, in order to save Mankind from an overheating Earth, we need to stop runaway greenhouse gases that are apparently warming the planet, namely CO2. The life saving idea is that we should modify our industrial output, by using less of this very poisonous and toxic substance, and then use an even more dramatic accounting method to share the pollution equally with those nations who "have" and those who "have not". The economic cost or loss involved has little or nothing to do with the outcome, as doing "something" to save Mankind from the destruction of our planet far outweighs doing "nothing".

It all sounds a fantastic idea to save the human race from certain death, but in fact it’s just another ideological panacea. This is all designed to keep up the momentum that man is changing the Earth's climate to such an extent that unless the Human race do something now, we are all going to die. There is another way to look at this situation, and that is, it has become another version of the Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes". The Emperor, or to use this analogy, the principal so called climate scientists, are on display to the main stream media, the media report what they have been told, and in turn inform the public at large that the Emperor is looking great in his new clothes in spite of being totally naked. Naked being the description used for a complete lack of scientific evidence to support this label of scientific office.

There is a lot of talk these days about the legacy we will leave our children and our grandchildren. When I stare into the immediate future, I see a frightening legacy caked in darkness and famine. Instead of intelligently preparing, we find ourselves whittling away this precious time chasing fraudulent theories. We have a decade to prepare, but have a misguided sense of direction and urgency.

Climate change is primarily driven by nature. It has been true in the days of my father and his father and all those that came before us. Because of science, not junk science, we have slowly uncovered some of the fundamental mysteries of nature. Our Milky Way galaxy is awash with cosmic rays. These are high speed charged particles that originate from exploding stars. Because they are charged, their travel is strongly influenced by magnetic fields. Our sun produces a magnetic field that extends to the edges of our solar system.

This field deflects many of the cosmic rays away from Earth. But when the sun goes quiet (minimal sunspots), this field collapses inward allowing cosmic rays to penetrate deeper into our solar system. As a result, far greater numbers collide with Earth and penetrate down into the lower atmosphere where they ionize small particles of moisture (humidity) forming them into water droplets that become clouds. Low level clouds reflect sunlight back into space. An increase in Earth's cloud cover produce a global drop in temperature. These periods of quiet sun are referred to as a Grand Minima. The Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) and the Dalton Minimum (1790-1830) are examples.

David Hathaway's predictions for the next two solar cycles and, in pink, Mausumi Dikpati's prediction for cycle 24.

According to theory and observation, the speed of the belt foretells the intensity of sunspot activity ~20 years in the future. A slow belt means lower solar activity; a fast belt means stronger activity.

I will try and sift through as many articles as I can to bring you up to date on SC25, my first stop is the Long Range Solar Forecast by NASA issued on the 5th May 2006. It makes a very important point, in that SC25 will have one of the lowest counts of Sunspots in 200-300 years! This could be the same level of Sunspots that started the Dalton Minimum in 1790. With a forecast like that, I hope you see why I want to pass on this information, it is kinda important!

May 10, 2006: The Sun's Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record-low crawl, according to research by NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. "It's off the bottom of the charts," he says. "This has important repercussions for future solar activity."